UCLA Researchers Produce Nuclear Fusion

Associated Press ^ | April 27, 2005 | Alicia Chang

[Physicist]

Ah well, maybe when oil hits $1,000/bbl we'll feel a bit more pressure to get off out collective duffs and get serious.

But fusion isn't a replacement for oil. It's just a new source of (presumably cheap and renewable) power.

Industrial power we got. If domestically sourced, industrial power were all we needed, we'd burn coal and have done. But it's hard to run a car on coal. Doable, yes, but hard. What we really need is a better way to store energy on a small scale. Nothing touches gasoline right now.

[jennyp]

Tut, tut! The Farnsworth fusor is a hot fusion device. It works by getting the nuclei to move fast enough to overcome their electrostatic repulsion.

Ah, true. I was thinking of that one fusor that they wheeled around on a serving cart. "Desktop fusion" is more like it.

[PatrickHenry]

"The Secret History of the Candle Cartel" -- coming to an Art Bell show soon!

The connection to the Illuminati is rather obvious.

[chimera]

Nope. It was a deuteron beam directed at a teflon target. The deuterons lodged in the target, and another deuteron came down the beamline and struck one of the embedded deuterium nuclei. The D+D reaction produced neutrons in the several MeV range with a threshold for the incident target at around 220 KeV, another at around 340 KeV. After running that for a while we switched to a tritiated target and made the 14 MeV neutrons via the D+T reaction. Nicely defined emission peak for those guys.

[chimera]

Nope. It was a deuteron beam directed at a teflon target. The deuterons lodged in the target, and another deuteron came down the beamline and struck one of the embedded deuterium nuclei. The D+D reaction produced neutrons in the several MeV range with a threshold for the incident target at around 220 KeV, another at around 340 KeV. After running that for a while we switched to a tritiated target and made the 14 MeV neutrons via the D+T reaction. Nicely defined emission peak for those guys.

[chimera]

My guess, without running all the numbers, is that it is a net endothermic process.

[chimera]

Sorry for the double post. I spazed out and pushed the Post button twice...grrrrr!

[inquest]

He-3 is rarer than hen's teeth! He itself is not that abundant, but He-3 constitutes only 0.00013% of all He.

Now I'm assuming here that the sun's fusion reactions produce mostly He-4. Is there some reason why we can't, or it that just way beyond our capabilities here on earth?

[Arthalion]

We can create He-3, but it takes too much energy. We would spend more power generating the fuel than we'd get out of the resulting fusion reaction.

It would be like chemically synthesizing gasoline...we could do it, but gas would cost us $50 a gallon and it would take 5 gasoline gallons worth of energy to create one. It's possible, but pointless.

[PatrickHenry]

I'm confused by your dialogue, or maybe I'm mis-reading your symbols. Deuterium and tritium are isotopes of hydrogen, not helium, and they probably have the rarities described.

[chimera]

One possible product of the D+D reaction is 3He plus a neutron. The other is D+D leading to a triton and proton. But making measurable amounts of 3He this way would take forever using accelerators.

These are some of the reactions that occur in thermonuclear devices, but I wouldn't want to make the 3He that way, either. Much too messy.

We'd have better luck mining it from the moon, as some have suggested. But I don't think we'll see that happening for a while yet. For now, aneutronic fusion isn't going to happen. If fusion happens at all, it will be with some neutron production, which leads to activation, embrittlement, etc. Plus some of this reactions (one is noted above) produce tritium, sometimes in sizable quantities, so there goes the "no radioactive waste" argument. Granted that tritium is a low-energy beta emitter and thus not too difficult to manage, but it is awfully mobile in the ecosphere, and can cause certain groups of radiophobic individuals to freak out (just ask the people who used to work at the High Flux Beam Reactor at Brookhaven Lab, that my old pal Bill Richardson had shutdown).

[inquest]

I don't think anyone was talking about tritium. When we said He-3, we meant helium. I know that there's a good supply of it on the moon, deposited by the solar wind.

[PatrickHenry]

Okay. I misunderstood.

[GOPJ]

Thanks for the ping.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[RadioAstronomer]

He-3 is rarer than hen's teeth! He itself is not that abundant, but He-3 constitutes only 0.00013% of all He.

I have He-3 in my watch. :-)

[PatrickHenry]

I have He-3 in my watch.

And E coli in your gut.

[inquest]

Seriously?

(no, I don't mind taking the Gullibility Award if it turns out you were just being facetious)

[RadioAstronomer]

Seriously?

Yuppers.

I have tritium in the hands and numbers (for night use) that decays into HE-3. :-)

[inquest]

Night use - so we're talking radioactive (beta, I assume) glow?

So is this a standard feature in a lot of watches, or something that only scientist-types can get?